What is the Heritage Language Consortium?

The LEAD Summer School in Second Language Acquisition is an initiative of the Heritage Language Consortium. The Consortium is a strategic partnership involving Tübingen University, Lancaster University, the University of Lisbon, the University of Minho, NOVA University Lisbon, the University of Porto, and the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The objective of the Consortium is to promote research on language learning in a variety of settings (from naturalistic development to classroom-based instruction) and across different age groups (children, adolescents and adults). The focus of our research will be on the acquisition of Portuguese in multilingual settings, though the insights gained from Consortium projects will be applicable to other languages.

Our research will help us understand how children and adults learn new languages and identify those factors that make some of us particularly good language learners. We can then use these insights to improve language education.

Consortium projects involve leading researchers from a range of disciplines (theoretical linguistics, education, computational linguistics, cognitive psychology, language pedagogy, corpus linguistics, second language research) and a range of methodological approaches. In addition, the Consortium also participates in impact and outreach activities to engage with parents, teachers and policy makers.

To learn more about the Consortium, or to get involved, please visit our website or email heritage-language@lancaster.ac.uk.